Grave Goods aka Relics of the Dead Read online

  The champion made an effort: “How long?”

  “Do we just strap it up?” Emma asked.

  “We do, yes.” Adelia turned to Roetger. “We must ensure you don’t move it at all. As for how long it will take to heal…” She searched her memory for what the school’s lecturer on limbs had said-she herself had never treated this particular injury. “It may be a very long time, longer than the break in your arm… perhaps six months…”

  Roetger’s eyes went wide with shock.

  Aghast, Emma said, “Six months?”

  Adelia grabbed her by the arm and took her outside the tent. “You can’t abandon him. What would he do? How could he return to Germany on one foot?”

  Emma was indignant. “I don’t intend to abandon him. He was injured in my service. Of course I’ll care for him.”

  Adelia sighed with relief. The gentle Emma of old still survived under the harsher surface of the new.

  “But he’ll have to travel with us,” the newer Emma said sharply. “I may have a use for him after we get to Wells.”

  “Not for six months, you won’t.” Adelia began making a list. “The whole lower leg will have to be splinted. A decoction of willow bark for the pain. And comfrey, we’ll need comfrey, but that grows everywhere, and we must hope it works on tendons as well as broken bones.” She started off toward where the traders were dismantling their pavilions to beg some struts for a splint.

  Emma called after her: “Is he in much pain?”

  “Agony.”

  AT LAST IN BED at the Aylesbury inn at which they were all staying, Adelia worried about the heel most of the night. She had put on a rough splint for the time being, but that wouldn’t be good enough, not if it was to endure the rigors of travel over rutted roads and prevent its owner from being tempted to put his foot to the ground, something that had to be avoided at all costs.

  At dawn she was in the inn’s stable yard, making inquiries to a sleepy ostler as to where she might gather comfrey. Since every county had its own name for the plant, he and she were at crosspurposes for a while until, finally enlightened, the man said, “Oh, you’re a-meaning knit-bone,” and directed her to an untidy patch of ground beyond a vegetable garden where clusters of young lance-shaped leaves and new yellow flowers were becoming visible in the dark green crowns of the old plants.

  It was mostly comfrey roots that Adelia wanted, and she dug for them with her trowel, wishing she’d worn gloves-the hairy leaves were an irritant to the skin.

  Carrying her spoils back to the inn, she found the pilgrims at breakfast and in shock. They’d received appalling news.

  “ Glastonbury is burned down,” the Yorkshireman told her. “Aye, we had it from two separate peddlers last night. Burned down. Glastonbury. Glastonbury. Reckon the heart’s gone out of England.”

  It was a heart that had been beating for more centuries than anybody could remember, empowered by the holiest of the holy-Saint Joseph of Arimathea, Saint Patrick of Ireland, Saint Bride, Saint Columba, Saint David of Wales, Saint Gildas… And now it had stopped.

  There was puzzlement in the room, as well as shock. A glove maker from Chester expressed it: “You’d have thought with all those saints, at least one of ’em would’ve put the damned fire out.”

  “King Arthur should have,” said somebody else. “How could he sleep through that?”

  There was a feeling that the blessed dead of Glastonbury had not pulled their weight.

  Emma entered the room to be told of the calamity and was aghast. “ Glastonbury?”

  “Aye. Never have thought it, would thee?” the Yorkshire burgher said. “And a right conflagration it were, so it’s said; noothing left, not noothing, sooch a pity. And I were looking forward to a blessing from Joseph of Arimathea.” He shook his head. “Should’ve set out earlier.”

  The Cheshire abbess was less upset. “I said all along we ought to be making for Canterbury. With Saint Thomas we are assured of even stronger sanctity, his being the latest martyrdom. Ah, who would have thought such a blessed saint would be killed by his king…”

  The Yorkshireman cut her off in mid-flow; her companions had heard the abbess’s strictures on Henry Plantagenet’s perfidy in crying for the death of his obstructive archbishop many times before. He said, “Aye, well, that’s where we’re a-going now-to Canterbury.” There was no virtue to be had from Glastonbury ’s bones and relics now that they had been reduced to ashes, whereas there was much to be gained from the vials of Saint Thomas à Becket’s blood that were on sale in the cathedral where he’d died.

  Bills paid, packing done, the pilgrims congratulated Emma on her triumph in the trial by combat, which, they said, they had much enjoyed, and bade her farewell. The man from Yorkshire kissed her hand. “Right sorry we are to be leaving your coompany, my lady.”

  “I’m sorry, too.” Emma meant it. Without the pilgrims, and with Master Roetger disabled, the journey to Wells would be considerably less safe.

  Adelia didn’t stay to wave good-bye; she was already at work to ensure the immobilization of a heel.

  Gyltha was ordered to the kitchen to begin pounding the pile of comfrey roots to a mash in the largest mortar the inn could provide, while Mansur, armed with an ax, a whittling knife, and instructions, was sent off to find an ash tree and a willow. Adelia herself impounded the services of Emma’s most experienced groom, Alan, and both were to be seen in the stable yard drawing diagrams in its dust.

  To facilitate matters, Master Roetger was carried to the cart and put on its cushions with his legs dangling over the tailboard until the bad one, which was bare, could be placed with care across a sawing horse. It was a maneuver causing excitement among the inn servants, who forgathered under the impression that they were to watch a Saracen doctor-Mansur’s assumed role-perform an amputation.

  Instead, they saw Gyltha hold some of the comfrey leaves to the heel while Adelia gently plastered them into place with the unpleasant-smelling green-black paste from the mortar, eventually encasing the entire foot, including the sole, and lower shin with it.

  Under the lash of the innkeeper’s tongue, his staff returned to work-it was, after all, only the usual home remedy of comfrey being applied to a breakage by a couple of women.

  When the foot was done, the broken arm was treated to the same procedure. Pain compressed the patient’s mouth into a straight line and sweat glistened in the furrows of his forehead, but he tried to show interest.

  “In my country this plant we also eat,” he said. “Schwarzwurz, we call it. Fried in batter, it is good.”

  Adelia was interested. England ’s peasantry ate boiled comfrey, as they did nettles, as a vegetable. To put the leaves in egg, flour, and milk argued a higher standard of living.

  “And now we’re batterin’ you,” Gyltha told him, making him smile.

  Finished, Adelia stood back. “There. How does that feel?”

  “Six months, truly?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “But I walk again?”

  “Yes,” she told him, hoping to God she was right, “you will.”

  Leaving the patient as he was while the plaster dried in the sun, she and Gyltha repaired to the horse trough to wash the stuff off their hands. Emma, who’d been watching, came up to them. “How long is this going to take?”

  Adelia began explaining that there was more to do, but Emma, exclaiming, walked away.

  “Temper, temper,” Gyltha said. “What’s up with her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  There was a lot more to be done. Adelia, the groom, and Mansur worked all morning weaving a cage of withies they’d devised for the leg. It had a base of wood that Mansur had whittled into a bowl that should, if Roetger accidentally put his foot to the ground, keep most of the pressure off his heel.

  Occasionally, Emma came to the window of her room to watch them and huff with impatience, but Adelia took no notice-this was an injury new to her, and she was determined to mend it.

  It was after noon by the time the comfrey plaster had dried rock-hard and the cage could be strung around it. Even then, Adelia delayed the start of the journey until she had attached the front of the cage by string to a hook in the edge of the cart’s roof so that the champion’s foot was gimballed and any jolt in traveling would merely sway it in the air.

  “He looks ridiculous,” Emma said.

  For the first time, Roetger complained. “I am like trussed chicken.”

  But Adelia was adamant. “You stay trussed,” she said. After Aylesbury, they would be turning southwest onto minor roads that were unlikely to have been kept in good repair.

  Nor were they. During the early spring rains, the wheels of farm vehicles had scored ruts as deep as ditches into surfaces that nobody had subsequently filled in, leaving them to dry as hard as cement.

  Time and again, the company had to pause while the grooms saw to a wheel in danger of coming off the cart, though Adelia preened herself on the fact that Roetger’s leg had merely been swung from side to side in its cage and taken no harm. At each overnight stop, Emma summoned the local reeve and berated him for his village’s lack of duty in repairing the section of road for which it was responsible, though whether her lecture did any good was doubtful-highway upkeep was expensive and time-consuming.

  Apart from rough traveling, it was a lovely journey. The air was filled with the call of the cuckoo and the scent of the bluebells that paved every wood as far as the eye could see into the trees.

  The risk of robbery was lessened by the amount of innocent traffic on the roads or crisscrossing them, brought out by the good weather: falconers, market people, bird nesters, families paying visits, groups of vengeful gamekeepers after foxes and pine martens. The cavalcade exchanged greetings and news with
all of them. True, Master Roetger suffered as they passed through villages where rude boys mistook his chained and recumbent position for that of a felon being taken to prison and threw stones at him, but the going through increasingly lush countryside was good, and Adelia would have enjoyed it if it hadn’t been for Emma’s behavior and, surprisingly, that of her own daughter.

  A strong character, Allie, despite her lack of years. At first her mother had thought the child was following her own footsteps in being fascinated by anatomy. Which, in a sense, she was-but only in that of animals. If it didn’t have scales, four legs, fur, or fins, Allie wasn’t interested in it. All living fauna delighted her, and should the subject be dead, she wanted to know why it had delighted her, why it flew, crawled, swam, or galloped. By the age of three, she had wept over the death of the jackdaw trained to perch on her shoulder-and then dissected it. By four, thanks to a local hunter, she was familiar with the muscles that made a deer run, the bones in the shoveling arms of a mole-a creature trapped mercilessly in the fens because its runs weakened the dikes that held back floods.

  At the beginning of the journey Allie had been charmed by her two-year-old playmate. Yet, loving the train’s horses and mules as she did, she wanted to be the center of attention to their grooms-a breed she’d always got on well with. But the grooms were employed by Emma and, by extension, young Pippy, who, if there was a ride to be had at the head of the cavalcade, came first. Little Lord Wolvercote was fussed over not only by his mother and servants but by Gyltha and Adelia as well, and the green-eyed monster of jealousy began to show in Allie’s eyes and in the hits and pushes that sent the little boy to the ground. It came to the point at which the adults couldn’t turn their backs without a wail from Pip as Allie attacked him again.

  Mortified, Gyltha lectured, without effect.

  “Don’t like him,” Allie said, explaining why she’d pulled a switch from a tree and beaten Lord Wolvercote’s bottom with it.

  “She’s a spoiled little madam,” Gyltha said to Adelia, having taken the switch from Allie’s hand and whacked the child’s behind in turn. “She won’t say sorry. You got to do something.”

  Secretly, Adelia admired her daughter’s defiance in the face of condemnation and whipping, but Gyltha was right-something had to be done to correct her. She tried an indirect approach and made a doll out of sticks and bandages on which she drew a hideous face, calling it Puncho. She gave it to her daughter. “You are not winning friends with behavior like this, Allie, so when you feel like hitting Pippy, hit Puncho instead.”

  Allie regarded the monstrosity with favor and tucked it under her arm. “I like Puncho,” she said. “Don’t like Pippy.” And she continued the assaults until it was impossible, during rests on the road, to allow both children to run around on the verge together.

  Incurring Adelia’s gratitude, Emma was tolerant about the situation, though she made sure her son was kept out of Allie’s way. “I know how the child feels. At the convent, I used to pinch little Sister Priscilla when I thought Mother Edyve was favoring her over me.”

  Yet she, too, was behaving badly. Adelia failed to realize why Emma, so understanding of Allie, showed resentment at the care lavished on Master Roetger, for whom she seemed to lack all sympathy. “Does he really need to be cooed over?” she would ask, as Gyltha and Adelia attended to their patient. She clucked with irritation when the grooms had to carry Roetger into the trees to help him with his calls of nature, and at the lengthy arrangements that had to be made for him on the ground floor of every inn at which they passed the night-Adelia refused to allow him to be carried upstairs in case his foot should encounter an obstruction in the process.

  It was as if Emma’s champion’s needs embarrassed her as much as they did him.

  Enlightenment eventually dawned during a rare moment of intimacy when, having reached Marlborough and seen the children to bed, Emma and Adelia were drawn by a lovely evening into the rose garden of their inn-one of the richest they had stayed at so far.

  As they walked, Emma’s voice came to her companion out of a scented dusk. “Should you like more children, ’Delia?”

  “Yes. Very much, but I’m unlikely to have them now.”

  “You might marry.”

  “No.” Having kept her independence by refusing marriage to Rowley, she wasn’t going to surrender it now. She said, lightly, “For one thing, any respectable man would regard me as spoiled goods.”

  Emma didn’t disagree. They walked on. After a while, Emma said, “I don’t want more children. Another son, for instance, might complicate Pippy’s inheritance.”

  Adelia didn’t see how it could; the laws of succession were strict, though she merely asked, “So you won’t marry again?”

  “No.” Emma was sharp about it. “And thanks to you, I don’t have to. But…”

  It was a lingering conjunction. Adelia waited to hear what it led to.

  Suddenly, there was an outburst of anguish. “They talk about the joys of the marriage bed, but I never knew them-not with him, he did things to me… I was forced… I fought… I never consented, never…”

  “I know.” Adelia took her friend’s arm. “I know.”

  “Yet there must be joys,” Emma said desperately. “You knew them with Rowley. There must be gentler men, loving men.”

  “Yes,” Adelia told her with authority, “there are. You may meet one, Emmy. You could marry again, this time by your own choosing.”

  “No.” It was almost a scream. “I don’t trust… I shall not be subject again… You of all people should understand that.”

  Nearby, a nightingale began to sing, its cadences refreshing the garden like silvery drops of water. The two women stopped to listen.

  More quietly, Emma went on. “I am seventeen years old, ’Delia. If I live to be ancient, I shall never have known pleasure with a man.”

  Adelia waited. This outpouring was heading somewhere; she didn’t know where. Emma was expecting something from her, but she didn’t know what that was, either.

  “But suppose,” Emma said desperately, “suppose, for the sake of argument, one set one’s heart on a man, an unsuitable man, someone… oh, I don’t know, of a status below one’s own.”

  She became irritated, as if she expected Adelia to answer a question she had not put. Going briskly ahead, she said over her shoulder, “Somebody one couldn’t marry, even if one wanted to, because his occupation and birth would bring social obloquy on one… and one’s child. Suppose that.”

  Adelia tried to. Ahead of her, Emma’s figure was that of an elegant ghost in the moonlight, a pale shade that flicked petals from the roses it passed as if it disdained them.

  Walking behind, Adelia attempted to follow the circumlocution that Emma had used to pose her question. What was it her poor friend wanted from her? No marriage, never marriage. No children, never more children. A life without physical love, yet a heart, such a sad heart, longing for the tenderness of a man… an unsuitable man…

  Then understanding came. Adelia castigated herself. What a fool I am. Of course. I should have known. That’s it.

  She quickened her pace, caught Emma by the arm, and led her to a seat in an alcove of roses, made her sit down, and sat down herself.

  “Did I ever tell you my theory on how it is possible to avoid conception?” she asked, as if she was raising a different subject.

  “No,” Emma said, as if she, too, found the matter a new one. “No, I don’t believe you did.”

  “It’s my foster parents’ theory, in fact,” Adelia said. “They are an extraordinary couple, I think I’ve told you. They refuse to be bound by their differing religions-he’s a Jew, she’s a Christian, but their minds are free, so free, of laws, prejudices, superstition, imprisoned thinking…” She paused, overwhelmed by longing to see them again and by gratitude for the upbringing they had given her.

  “Really?” Emma said politely.

  “Yes. And they traveled, you see. To gain medical knowledge. They asked questions of different races, tribes, other histories, customs, and my foster mother, bless her, went to the women, especially the women.”

  “Yes?” Emma said, and again it seemed of little interest to her.

  “Yes. And by the time she returned to Salerno, she had gathered, first, that women through the ages have tried to have control over their own bodies-and the methods they’ve used.”